The Game of Game of Thrones

In their 2009 anthology, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives , editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardruip-Fruin discuss the explosive popularity of "vast narratives"; sweeping stories that combine multiple central characters and persistent, intertwining plot lines in a continuous transmedia narrative universe. This chapter evaluates the results within conventions of dramatic storytelling. In so doing, it suggests a form of dramaturgy that discovers key insights into the themes of The Game of Thrones that are not obvious to traditional analysis. The chapter uses data visualization to make our analysis instantly legible at multiple scales, matching the fractal nature of the source material in kind. It describes how to transform quantitative network data into qualitative evidence for critical analysis of vast narratives. The chapter focuses on identifying differences between characters and on evaluating how the distinct centrality measures offer insight into the positions, actions and motivations of the characters.